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The Wire
It's hard to sustain a sub-thread in a bigger thread on here, so I thought I'd start one of my own.
The Wire's pretty much the only music mag I read regularly. I keep meaning to subscribe, though I've not got round to it yet.
I read it because it covers the kind of music I like and is by far and away the best place to find out about artists I'd otherwise not hear of and because its in-depth articles are well-written, go to a great deal of depth and are informative. I enjoy them even if I'm not a fan of the artist, normally. The Derek Bailey article a few months back was fantastic and really got me thinking, even though I'm no great fan of his work.
Smaller features like the Invisible Jukebox are good too, and the photography is miles better than any other publication: tis often worth buying the mag for that alone.
All that said, I think it's sometimes guilty of reducing music to the sum of its parts when the end product is something far greater than that.
And its choice of albums to review seems a little odd, too. It had one album in the "avant rock" section that it compared to Franz Ferdinand, yet it largely ignores newer and more alternative stuff like Redjetson, Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies etc, etc. I'm not sure why, though I think it's fairly old demographic may have something to do with it.
The Wire's pretty much the only music mag I read regularly. I keep meaning to subscribe, though I've not got round to it yet.
I read it because it covers the kind of music I like and is by far and away the best place to find out about artists I'd otherwise not hear of and because its in-depth articles are well-written, go to a great deal of depth and are informative. I enjoy them even if I'm not a fan of the artist, normally. The Derek Bailey article a few months back was fantastic and really got me thinking, even though I'm no great fan of his work.
Smaller features like the Invisible Jukebox are good too, and the photography is miles better than any other publication: tis often worth buying the mag for that alone.
All that said, I think it's sometimes guilty of reducing music to the sum of its parts when the end product is something far greater than that.
And its choice of albums to review seems a little odd, too. It had one album in the "avant rock" section that it compared to Franz Ferdinand, yet it largely ignores newer and more alternative stuff like Redjetson, Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies etc, etc. I'm not sure why, though I think it's fairly old demographic may have something to do with it.